Obama’s Syria Red Line Tested by Chemical Weapons Report

U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel speaks with reporters in Cairo on April 24, 2013. Photographer: Jim Watson/Getty Images, Pool

April 26 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama is under
renewed pressure from lawmakers to increase U.S. efforts to oust
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad after U.S. intelligence
agencies reported “with varying degrees of confidence” that
the regime may have used small amounts of sarin nerve gas.

That’s a shift from the administration’s previous responses
to chemical-weapons allegations by Syrian opposition groups.
Although the U.S. intelligence community has differing levels of
confidence that Assad’s regime has used poison gas, the new
assessment draws Obama closer to his previously declared “red
line” over such use and has fueled calls for action by
lawmakers already advocating deeper involvement.

“The Syrians crossed the line the president had said would
be a game changer,” Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona
told reporters. New York Representative Eliot Engel, the ranking
Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said that it’s
“time for the U.S. and our allies to immediately arm” elements
of the Syrian opposition.

While he has used the words “red line” and “game
changer,” Obama hasn’t defined what would trigger more muscular
U.S. action or how his administration may respond to conclusive
evidence that Assad has used chemical or biological weapons.

Nonlethal Aid

Secretary of State John Kerry announced last week that the
U.S. is providing an additional $123 million to the Syrian
opposition, doubling so-called nonlethal aid, while some Persian
Gulf nations send arms and money. As the administration has
pressed at the United Nations for diplomatic efforts to remove
Assad, Obama has discouraged talk of U.S. military intervention.

Administration officials, including Defense Secretary Chuck
Hagel, yesterday stressed that the new intelligence assessment
isn’t a sufficient basis for military intervention.

“Given the stakes involved,” the assessment is “not
sufficient -- only credible and corroborated facts that provide
us with some degree of certainty will guide our decision-making,” Miguel E. Rodriguez, Obama’s legislative liaison to
Congress, wrote in a letter to lawmakers yesterday.

Speaking with reporters in Brussels today, Michael Mann,
the spokesman for European Union foreign policy chief Catherine
Ashton, said that while “any use of chemical weapons in any
circumstances is completely unacceptable,” the U.S.
intelligence assessment “wasn’t completely definitive.”

‘Still Monitoring’

“At the moment we are still monitoring this along with our
international partners to see what has really happened because
it doesn’t seem entirely clear at this point in time,” he said,
adding: “We’ve seen that the regime in Syrian regime doesn’t
seem to have much respect for human life. But we can’t be
definitive on this until we have seen definitive evidence.”

Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies, a Washington policy
research group, said “two small uses, if we can’t tie it to
Assad and to the regime, isn’t really a red line.”

Particularly after the George W. Bush administration’s
embrace of faulty intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq, it’s important not to overreact, Cordesman said.

‘Clear Context’

“You need to wait long enough to have a clear context for
action,” he said. “Then the American political debate has to
suddenly realize: If you’re telling the president it’s a red
line and it’s been crossed, you’d better be in the position to
agree to the use of force.”

The Obama administration already is under pressure -- from
U.S. lawmakers, Israel, France, the U.K., the Syrian opposition
and Persian Gulf nations seeking Assad’s removal -- to start
providing weapons to the rebels. Some, such as McCain, also are
urging the creation of a no-fly zone over the country, or
sending in troops to seize Assad’s chemical and biological
weapons before they fall into terrorists’ hands.

The administration remains reluctant to get involved
militarily in part because it has insufficient intelligence on
the Syrian regime and opposition groups, which include Islamic
extremists allied with al-Qaeda, two U.S. officials said
yesterday. Both spoke on the condition of not being identified
because they have access to classified information on Syria.

No Consensus

The officials said there is no consensus in the U.S.
intelligence community about whether Syria has used small
amounts of nerve gas, with different agencies expressing widely
varied confidence in the assessment. Some agencies had only low
to moderate confidence in the intelligence.

The U.S. would need the highest level of confidence to
present evidence of Syrian chemical weapons use to the
international community and make a case for action against the
Assad regime. The current intelligence assessments fall short of
that standard, said one of the officials.

According to the definitions used by the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence, “Low confidence generally
means that the information’s credibility and/or plausibility is
questionable, or that the information is too fragmented or
poorly corroborated to make solid analytic inferences, or that
we have significant concerns or problems with the sources.”

“Moderate confidence generally means that the information
is credibly sourced and plausible but not of sufficient quality
or corroborated sufficiently to warrant a higher level of
confidence,” according to the definitions.

‘Extremely Serious’

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, who described the
“limited but growing evidence” as “extremely serious,” said
today that Britain and its allies are being careful not to
repeat the mistakes over Iraq. Support for the Syrian opposition
should be stepped up, Cameron said, though he said British
troops are unlikely to be sent to Syria.

“This is a war crime, and we should take it very
seriously,” Cameron said in an interview with the BBC. “We’ve
been careful not to make the mistake sometimes made in the past
that as soon as you see a report you rush into print. We’re
trying to consider the evidence with our allies, make sure that
we can verify it, but this is extremely serious and I think what
President Obama said was absolutely right, that this should be
for the international community a red line for us to do more.”

The U.K. Foreign Office issued a statement yesterday that
spoke of “limited but persuasive information from various
sources showing chemical-weapon use in Syria, including sarin.”

Mass Casualties

The second U.S. official said there is no evidence of mass
casualties, which suggests that if the Assad regime did use such
weapons, it did so only in small quantities that are very
difficult to trace.

It’s possible, that official said, that a local military
commander may have used small amounts of the odorless nerve gas
to terrorize people, rather than as a weapon of mass
destruction, and it isn’t clear whether any use might have been
authorized by Assad or other top regime officials.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has designated a fact-finding team of specialists to look into reports of chemical-weapons use if the Syrian government grants it “full and
unfettered” access, according to a statement from a spokesman.

Despite the U.S. intelligence community’s low to moderate
confidence, the new assessment quickly prompted fresh calls on
Capitol Hill for more U.S. action. Lawmakers from both parties
cited Obama’s past statements that a “red line” would be
crossed if the Assad regime used chemical weapons.

‘Bloodletting,’ ‘Massacre’

“I hope the administration will consider what we have been
recommending now for over two years in this bloodletting and
massacre, that is to provide a safe area for the opposition to
operate, to establish a no-fly zone and provide weapons to
people in the resistance whom we trust,” McCain said.

McCain has advocated U.S. military support for Syrian
rebels to speed the fall of the Assad regime in a war that has
claimed more than 70,000 lives since March 2011.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who leads
the Senate intelligence committee, said in a statement that it’s
“clear that red lines have been crossed and action must be
taken to prevent larger-scale use.”

While she urged the UN Security Council to step up efforts
to end the conflict, House Speaker John Boehner, an Ohio
Republican, said he was “deeply concerned” that further
confirmation of chemical weapons use “may be outsourced” to
the UN.

Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, the senior Republican on
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement that
“while more work needs to be done to fully verify this
assessment -- like making sure we understand the chain of
custody of the evidence -- it is becoming increasingly clear
that we must step up our efforts.”

Physiological Samples

The U.S. intelligence assessment is based “in part on
physiological samples,” and issues remain that complicate an
authoritative conclusion, according to Rodriguez, the White
House congressional liaison. He cited questions about how the
evidence was handled, how the exposure occurred and under what
conditions in his letter to McCain and Senator Carl Levin, a
Michigan Democrat and chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

A White House official declined to describe what sort of
“physiological samples” were analyzed, or to say when and
where the alleged chemical attacks occurred. The official spoke
with reporters on condition of not being identified at the
insistence of the White House.

In Israel last month, Obama said, “I have made clear that
the use of chemical weapons is a game changer.” In August, amid
concern that Assad would resort to extreme actions, Obama said,
“We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other
players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing
a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being
utilized.”